1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to improving the production of a mature gas or oil field. More precisely, the present invention relates to the use of a field simulator for determining drill location for new wells and/or new injectors.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mature oil and gas fields, with many producers and a long production history, become increasingly complex to comprehend properly with each passing year. Usually, after several drilling campaigns, no obvious solution exists to mitigate their decline using affordable hardware technologies. Still, there is room for improvement of the production over a so-called “baseline” or “business as usual” behavior of an entire mature field.
Field simulators have been developed to model the behavior of a mature oil or natural gas field and to forecast an expected quantity produced in response to a given set of applied production parameters. A type of field simulator capable of predicting the production of a field, well by well, for a given scenario, in a relatively short amount of time (a few seconds) has recently emerged.
However, substantial variations can be envisaged on the way to drill additional wells such that billions of possible scenarios exist. So far no traditional analysis has been able to identify an optimum scenario reliably. In particular, using a traditional meshed field simulator to determine the production of the field for each of the possible scenarios, in order to select the best one, would require an excessive amount of calculation time.